ART REVIEW: Bottecelli exhibit celebrates Florentine master

Thursday

Apr 27, 2017 at 7:00 AM

“Botticelli and the Search for the Divine” has a depth that belies its relatively small size – just 15 works by the 15th-century Renaissance master. Nonetheless, it is the largest exhibit of Botticelli ever mounted in the United States, a sign of the challenge of receiving loans from Italian museums.

By Jody Feinberg/The Patriot Ledger

At the entrance to the Botticelli exhibit, there are none of his paintings. Instead, there are works by Fra Filippo, the painter in whose Florence workshop Botticelli developed.

“No artist works in a vacuum,” said Museum of Fine Arts curator Frederick Ilchman. “He was shaped by his culture and also transformed it.”

By providing context, “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine” has a depth that belies its relatively small size – just 15 works by the 15th-century Renaissance master, plus about a dozen paintings by his predecessors and peers, rare books and other objects. Nonetheless, it is the largest exhibit of Botticelli ever mounted in the United States, a sign of the challenge of receiving loans from Italian museums. (Works from the MFA, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Harvard Art Museums also are included.)

“He stands for 15th-century Florence more than any other artist,” said Ilchman, who collaborated on the exhibit with the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary. “We want people to say, ‘Wow, I get why he’s such a big deal now and was so esteemed by his peers.’”

For most of his career under the patronage of the Medici family, Sandro Botticelli painted both religious works, particularly Madonna and Child, and secular ones, Greek and Roman goddesses. In both cases, he saw divinity in human beauty and grace.

“He brought a new level of naturalism and human psychology to religious art,” Ilchman said. “They’re not just symbols. They’re living beings interacting.”

As an example, Ilchman selected “Virgin and Child (Madonna of the Book)” as the first Botticelli visitors see. In this work, the Madonna holds on her lap baby Jesus, who rests his hands on hers and looks up at her. Her intensely blue clothing and their crowns of gold – created from lapis lazuli and gold threads – highlight their ivory skin.

“It’s the ideal of feminine beauty,” Ilchman said. “She is lovely and pensive. And there is tenderness between mother and child. He has endowed them with life.”

The highlight of the exhibit is “Venus,” where the goddess of love closely resembles the one in his most famous work “Birth of Venus” (popularized by the television show “The Simpsons”). Instead of standing in a half shell, she stands on a gray parapet against a black backdrop. Without other images to distract, she is riveting with her sensuous curves, long, graceful fingers, cascading strawberry blond hair, and serene, thoughtful, downward gaze. She is naked, covered skimpily by a sheer cape and her hair.

“It’s incredible that he had a type of feminine beauty and this type speaks to us today more than 500 years later,” Ilchman said.

Even the toughest goddesses had beauty, which can be seen in the massive work “Minerva and the Centaur,” on loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A human-size Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom and of war, grabs the hair of a frightened half-man, half-human beast and, with the other hand, holds a menacing spear-ax, which extends from the top to the bottom of the painting. Like Venus, she has long, flowing hair, alabaster skin, a pensive face and sheer clothing.

“She’s not just beautiful and graceful, she’s tough,” Ilchman said. “The sense of the divine can be seen in order over chaos, reason over instinct.”

After the death of Lorenzo de Medici and the invasion of Italy by France in 1494, Friar Girolamo Savonarola became the de facto ruler of Florence and set off a period of great upheaval that influenced Botticelli.

After that, Botticelli abandoned classical mythology and painted only religious works, emphasizing sacredness, rather than humanity. Typical of his late works, “Virgin and Child With the Young Saint John the Baptist” has stiffer figures, flattened depth, muter colors and closed eyes, as though the figures are shutting out the physical world.

“He seemed to develop more piety,” Ilchman said.

While Botticelli painted portraits of Florentine men, on view, the key figures in his life appear in a different form: “Death Mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent” is an exact likeness of his patron’s full face, and “Portrait of Friar Girolamo Savonarola” shows the fanatic’s profile engraved on a bronze medal.

For centuries after his death, Botticelli was overlooked, his status replaced by later Florentine artists like Michelangelo – whose early-16th-century paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel seemed to draw attention away from Botticelli’s many wall frescoes. (An example of his fresco artistry can be seen in the compelling and, in his day, best-known work, “Saint Augustine in His Study.”)

Yet, in the late 1800s, Botticelli again became admired. In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased his paintings, several of which hang in the exhibit. They make Boston proud.

Jody Feinberg may be reached at jfeinberg@ledger.com or follow her on Twitter @JodyF_Ledger.BOTTICELLI and the SEARCH for the DIVINE At the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, through July 9, 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org.